Fallout tidbits 19-2010

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Fallout tidbits

The Fallout tidbits are a summary of various minor articles and newsbits concerning Fallout games.If you want to propose a link to be included in the next tidbit post, simply post it in a comment under this one.

Here's yet another roundup of minor Fallout-related tidbits. If you have more, please post them here in the comments.

New Vegas has a traditional video game story, and all of its sub-stories are spelled out with familiar emotions and moments of conflict, but it resonates in a way that film and prose stories are incapable of. Rather than give privilege to an individual story, New Vegas creates an authored environment of interrelations in which players perceive common threads in hundreds of isolated happenings. All stories merge into a world view, rather than a single plot. Most remarkably, every major class of life has a sympathetic voice in New Vegas. The special strain of Super Mutant that's become addicted to using Stealth Boys in an early mission, gains a noble spokesperson in the later game. So too ghouls, various gang members, and factions that might be condemned as bullet fodder in any other game. There is a reason to help everyone, and there is a reason that everyone you meet can be made your enemy.

New Vegas is a perfect contradiction. It's staggering, exhausting, frustrating, and impossible to reduce to anything other than the exact form it takes. Its size terrifies me, as does its rewards. It is a game against the idea of human progress, a game with a horrible understanding for the little baby steps of thought that show us at our most self-destructive. Worse still is its sense of nobility, the honest and pure hope contained in each of those little baby steps. In that way, it's one of the most painful games I've played. In the most important ways we are doomed. We all die, and we all know it will come. We are surrounded on both sides by an infinite and indescribable absence of life. Likewise, we are doomed to create negative consequences in all we do, and they often become scarier and scarier the longer one lives. The hopeful good choices come at an increasingly cruel price.

Other reviewers suggest the main story plus quests could take 80 hours-plus to complete, and who has that sort of time?People generally rave about games that have huge areas to explore, but New Vegas almost takes it a step too far.

You will spend big chunks of time just roaming - on foot - around the bleak landscape, and it gets a little boring.

And while the game does look beautiful - if desolation can ever be considered beautiful - there are regular and frustrating glitches that can spoil the experience.

Happily, the role-playing elements are superb, from the interactions with characters, to the quest chains, to the levelling-up of your character and his or her weapons.

Fallout: New Vegas (PC, PS3, X360; $59.99; Rated M): The much-anticipated sequel to last year's best game, "Fallout 3," "New Vegas" offers a few interface tweaks and about 50 percent more total content, in terms of missions and virtual real estate. The terrific time-stop combat system returns, but beware - the game is riddled with bugs, including several of the game-freezing variety. That they're worth enduring is testament to the game's addictive qualities.